Coast Guard veteran returns home to help others
Kristopher Albrecht’s 22-year journey in the United States Coast Guard begins and ends in Tuolumne County. Albrecht, 44, of Twain Harte, retired in June 2020 as an avionics electrical technician first class and navigator on board C-130 aircraft that would take him to places throughout the world he never imagined he would see while growing up the son of a logger in a small town.
However, It was through personal tragedy that reminded Albrecht about the importance of family and inspired his return home last year with his wife and two children.
Most days now Albrecht can be seen working at the Tuolumne County Veterans Service Office on Hospital Road in Sonora, where he’s participating in a work-study program through the City College of San
Francisco in hopes of launching a second career as a veterans service officer.
“I like helping veterans,” he said. “It’s a pretty important job, in my opinion.”
Albrecht moved to the county with his family when he was 3 and graduated from Sonora High School in 1995.
After moving down to San Diego for junior college, Albrecht said he realized he was just going through the motions and didn’t have any idea about what he particularly wanted to study.
“When I graduated from high school, I thought I was going to college,” he said. “That’s what everyone tells you.”
It was in San Diego that Albrecht started looking into the military and found the Coast Guard sounded appealing, especially during a time of relative peace after Desert Storm and before the terrorist attacks against the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001.
“There’s always going to be people to rescue at sea or someone breaking the law at sea,” he said. “That was appealing to me.”
While back in town during the summer of 1998, Albrecht went with his father, local logger Mike Albrecht, down to the Coast Guard recruiting office in Fresno that to this day is the branch’s closest recruiting office to Tuolumne County.
Albrecht was off to boot camp by November 1998 at the Coast Guard Training Center in Cape May, New Jersey, where he quickly noticed the difference between his home state.
“That was my first time seeing snow on the beach,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is a lot different than California.’”
The eight-week training course was a typical military boot camp experience, which Albrecht described as being like “the most intense job interview of your life.”
“They’re preparing you for the real deal,” he said.
Out of boot camp, Albrecht got sent to Alameda and was assigned to a high endurance cutter called the Morgenthau.
Albrecht was stationed on the Morgenthau for about a year and a half, during which he was deployed four times to the Bering Strait, Alaska and twice to the South Pacific.
“It didn’t take me long to realize I wanted to work on planes and not ships,” he said.
The next stop in Albrecht’s Coast Guard career was avionics school from October 2000 to March 2001.
Albrecht said the school was an intensive crash course starting out with electronics troubleshooting all the way up to learning complex military avionics systems.
After avionics school, Albrecht was sent to Sacramento to work at a Coast Guard air station on a C-130 aircraft. He was driving into work on Sept. 11, 2001, when he heard the news on the radio about a plane hitting the World Trade Center.
“By the time I got into work, a lot more had happened,” he said of that fateful morning.
The next day, Albrecht’s station sent a plane filled with pallets of donated blood to New York at a time when the skies were empty because all other aircraft throughout the country had been grounded.
Like much of the world, the events of 9/11 fundamentally changed the Coast Guard forever.
Albrecht explained how the Coast Guard is unique from the other five military in that it is the smallest with just over about 40,000 active service members and is the only one to not operate under the Department of Defense, in part because it has a maritime law enforcement mission.
“We’ve always fallen under a different department than the DOD because of our
mission — boarding ships, intercepting immigrants — countries could call that an act of war,” he said. “We’re constantly responding to different worldwide disasters — hurricanes, tsunamis — we respond to all of those in some fashion.”
The 9/11 attacks prompted the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which the Coast Guard was moved to from previously being under Department of Transportation.
Much of what Albrecht did throughout the rest of his career was not related to 9/11 or the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, leaning more toward the aspects of the Coast Guard’s mission that involve law enforcement (such as intercepting drug smugglers), emergency
response, and search and rescue.
“You could be at the air station with wrenches in your hand working on the airplane, then the emergency alarm goes off and you have to be where you need to be,” he said.
Some notable moments Albrecht discussed included doing air surveys after Hurricane Ike in 2008 of oil rigs off the Texas gulf coast, deployments to every Central American country except for Honduras, and helping to pinpoint and rescue a man who had been lost at sea for weeks during an attempted solo voyage from Hawaii to California.
Albrecht fondly recalls his visits to small island nations and U.S. territories throughout the Pacific, such as Palmyra
Atoll, where he delivered supplies to scientists studying oceanography and different types of marine wildlife.
“It’s a coral airstrip with no markings or lighting on it, just a clearing in the trees, and we landed a C-130 on it,” he said. “When you get out, there’s a sign that says ‘Welcome to Palmyra’ and there’s a flipboard for what the population is at the time. That day it was 12, all scientists.”
While not island hopping, Albrecht spent time living in Sacramento, Hawaii and Seattle prior to retiring and moving back to Tuolumne County.
Albrecht met his wife, Jessica, who’s from Chico, on his 30th birthday while stationed in Sacramento. They now have two daughters Korrah, 9, and Charlize, 7.
The decision to retire and move back home was prompted in 2017 when cancer claimed the life of his 23-year-old stepson, Taylor, whom he had raised like his own.
“It made the most sense for us to wrap up my career in the Coast Guard and move kids here to be with uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins,” he said. “Family is important to us.”
Albrecht’s first encounter with the Tuolumne County Veterans Service Office was as a client himself needing help with navigating the post-career paperwork involved with accessing veterans’ benefits, which is how he learned about the work-study program from Vicki Sides, a veterans service representative at the office.
The office’s main mission is to help all veterans and their spouses determine eligibility for various state and federal benefits.
“They (the military) try to give you some information on your way out, but you are ultimately left to navigate all that on your own,” he said. “I want veterans to know we’re here to help them, and there may be services available to them that they might not know about.”
While being interviewed over the course of about an hour one October morning, Albrecht assisted about five different veterans seeking help that ranged from additional income for housing to finding out how they can be interred upon their death at the national military cemetery in Sacramento.
“I’m still learning all of the different opportunities and services available to veterans,” he said. “I didn’t know a veterans service office did so much.”
Albrecht said he’s also enjoying seeing his kids getting to experience what he did while growing up in Tuolumne County as a kid and being closer to his parents Mike Albrecht and Debi Mainard, as well as his siblings Jeremy Albrecht and Michelle Loh.
“Tuolumne County always felt like home,” he said. “I never felt settled anywhere else I lived.”